The Internet is a very powerful tool for transferring and obtaining information. Many new applications have become available since the Internet's advent. Just to name a few, these include electronic placement of bids over the Internet, electronic determination of the user's bank balance over the Internet, automatic registration for various services over the Internet, electronic shopping with an electronic shopping cart, and various, virtually uncountable numbers, of others.
For all of the power of the Internet, it also has significant limitations. The language of the Internet, HTML in its various flavors, can only be properly interpreted by a device which is capable of reading HTML. Many different plug-ins and additional programs can be used, and are basically used as HTML windows. For example, the various flavors of Java, can enhance the Internet environment. Many companies have produced streaming video applications, such as shockwave and/or animation applications. These are basically shown as an associated application to the HTML.
Much of the customization which has been done on the Internet is done for the purpose of enabling more complexity, and more items to be shown over the Internet. However, browsing from a hand-held device has become more popular. For example, the Internet can be browsed from a cellular phone, from a PDA such as a palm VII, or other thin clients. Typically the way in which this is done is by forming a special web page for those thin clients, which runs a scaled-down flavor of HTML that is optimized for such thin clients. Only those special web pages which are optimized in this way can be effectively viewed. For example, any attempt to use such a system to browse a normal, unoptimized web page, may cause an error, or may cause be information to be displayed in a way which makes it very difficult to effectively understand.
Other interactive hand-held devices, such as Blackberry devices and other devices which are optimized for e-mail and text messaging only, have no effective way to interact with the Internet. Therefore, while these devices are interactive in the sense that they can communicate and receive information via Internet-like channels, they can only receive information of a specified type.